


Another fine how-do-you-do

by GraceEliz



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Anakin is Not, Epic Bromance, Force Shenanigans, Gen, Vaderkin, anakin vader, the Lady will be having words when she gets back, the Son is enjoying himself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:55:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26730256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceEliz/pseuds/GraceEliz
Summary: The world slowly reformed before Firmus’ eyes, woozy swirls of grey and white becoming the ceiling of his living quarters. No light – only the dim gleam of the stars the Lady floated through above the planet whatever-it-was where they’d stopped for something. Bacta? No, not bacta. Something. Someone. Cloning facilities, that was it, cloning facilities to grow Lord Vader new lungs. Kamino, he finally decided, they were above Kamino.“Lady?”Silence, nothing but concerning silence, heavy and muffling.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader & The Crew of the Lady Ex, Firmus Piett & Anakin Skywalker & Maximilian Veers, The Son | Fanged God & The Daughter | Winged Goddess
Comments: 9
Kudos: 33





	Another fine how-do-you-do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wishfulthinking1979](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wishfulthinking1979/gifts).



> For Wish: enjoy.

The world slowly reformed before Firmus’ eyes, woozy swirls of grey and white becoming the ceiling of his living quarters. No light – only the dim gleam of the stars the Lady floated through above the planet whatever-it-was where they’d stopped for something. Bacta? No, not bacta. Something. Someone. Cloning facilities, that was it, cloning facilities to grow Lord Vader new lungs. Kamino, he finally decided, they were above Kamino. 

“Lady?”

Silence, nothing but concerning silence, heavy and muffling.

“Lady, please do something,” Firmus demanded, a growing ball of fear in his stomach – he’d passed out on his bedroom floor and now his ship was utterly silent. Lord Vader/Anakin was planetside with a squadron of the 501st and a team of medics. Max was – oh Force, Max. Somewhere on the frighteningly silent ship was his best friend. Repressing the swell of panic, he dove for his padd, praying to the Force and any deity listening that he would be able to make some type of contact. Max’s number appeared in the top slot of his ‘favourite contacts’ log.

Waiting for a response was the most draining experience of the last month.

Finally, interminably later, just as Piett’s thumbnail started looking a little ragged, the padd stopped the low buzz of the ‘attempting call’ call dial tone, replacing it with a ‘call in progress’ symbol.

“Firmus?”

“You’re okay, thank the Force,” gasped Firmus. They’d had enough near death experiences between them to rival any Skywalker; adding to the tally was not what they’d anticipated for this four-day stopover at a blimmin’ med facility to allow their commander yet another life-altering operation.

“Yeah, I’m okay. Are you? You’re sounding…strained.”

“The Lady isn’t responding,” he bit out. Max’s stunned and alarmed silence on the other end of the padd told him everything about his best friend’s reaction to the words. “We need to meet up, where are you?”

“Main hangar bay. But Firmus… Firmus, everyone has disappeared, and I’ve been out for only half an hour. There are no lifesigns in the hangar bays – I’m beside the computer terminal.” The man’s worry for his men bled into his hard voice.

It was to be one of those days, then. So be it. They agreed to meet on the bridge where it would be easiest to establish a baseline of information on the current bleak situation. No matter their abilities, neither the Iron General or The Admiral would be able to pilot the starship without crew; miracles were theirs to work but this was no miracle situation, no, what they needed was to wake up from the nightmare something or someone had trapped them in. Due to his quarters’ proximity to the bridge, Firmus arrived on the bridge first.

Empty. His bridge rang empty, as he could never remember it being: the brain of the ship empty. Rapid systematic examination of the Captain’s screens offered nothing, as did the comms station – which all logic dictated must have something – with no help from the lower stations in the Pits of the bridge. An empty bridge with nothing to offer explanation. Where to next? No readouts out of the ordinary; no reason for the bridge to be so spectacularly unmanned. “Well,” he said aloud to fill the discomforting silence with something, something, anything, “Never let it be said Piett and Veers can’t succeed against the odds. Now, where would I check first if this was an internal affair? The surveillance.” Accessing the necessary cameras would have been the work of seconds for the Lady; it took an entire five minutes for her fretful Admiral, by the end of which Max had finally reached the bridge.

“Firmus! Thank goodness you’re safe,” his friend said without trying to hide his worry. They took a moment’s comfort in each others’ presence, savouring the warm press of each other’s shoulders when Max leant down to watch the footage. The bridge hustled as it should at shift change, men passing padds around and pointing at readouts and clapping each other on the back as friendly comrades did these days in their newfound independence from any authority but their own. The bridge began to settle down, peaceful silence reigning over the bustle, and the cameras continued to record as they always had and always would so long as the General, Admiral and Lord held the metaphorical helm. All was calm for a further three minutes, until the recording just blipped. For one single second, maybe only half, the surveillance system blanked out, and when it re-started, the bridge was empty.

“Well kriff,” breathed Max.

“Whoever did this is going to pay in blood,” Firmus vowed quietly, spine straightening in restrained fury. Down in the Officer’s Lounge the cameras showed the same, a half-dozen navy men shoving more tables onto the four pushed together by some of the army men: perfect unity until The Blip erased everyone. Max reached down to type in his own codes to access the hangars, all of which showed perfect order until The Blip. A full-ship scan took fifteen minutes without the Lady to help, so they utilised that time in searching all systems accessible from the bridge for any sign of her. Both the scan and the search came up empty – all the codes to signal she didn’t need to hide, that it was them, even the codes their Lord had entrusted to them to be used only in the greatest emergency.

The two men were entirely alone on an until-recently-sentient 300,000 man vessel.

“Ideas, Max?”

Deep breath, he told himself, in-hold-out as in meditation. “Contact Kamino and hope our esteemed Lord and his thirty accompanying men can do something.”

“Only thirty?” asked Firmus, a little surprised. Usually Lord Anakin was accompanied by a minimum of thirty-five men if he hadn’t snuck out alone. The 501st – every man and woman and non-binary and droid aboard, frankly – had become ever more protective of their horrifyingly fragile Lord, especially now the Lady was a peace vessel and people had got a bit trigger-happy, thinking peaceful meant harmless.

“Yep. Should have been more, but he pulled a him, and flew off before the second half of his men arrived. He has fifteen troopers and fifteen medics down there,” Max informed him with a worried frown. They didn’t often try to say it directly to the man in question, but Lord Anakin Vader – or just Anakin, if you knew him closely enough – was a man who was well liked and even loved by many of the crew. Well liked, and much worried over.

The two men sat in silence for a moment, searching for some route of action to take. Could they hail nearby vessels? No, the comms were jammed. Map systems, navigation? Similarly down.

“Alright then,” hummed Max, “Deliberate. Well. Nothing to sober you up like an act of aggression.”

“Indeed,” he agreed grimly. “How typical. We stay in orbit above a blooming medical facility and lose the entire bloody ship’s complement.”

Max stood, decisive, spine hard as the durasteel beams forming the ribs of the Lady; hard and unkillable as legend made him out to be. “Let’s get into the hangar bays and try to use a small ship’s comm to contact the planet. We can splice that up between us, I am certain.”

“I’m sure we can,” he agreed. Hope was not an unwelcome emotion, even if it was a comparatively new one, and there was truly nobody else he would rather face an impossible situation with. Who could be a better ally than his best friend, his brother in all but blood? What was another insurmountable obstacle to the crew of the Lady Executor, the sentient ship, who was manned almost entirely by men and women loyal to Vader and Piett and Veers first and foremost? Insurmountable odds, do seven impossible things before breakfast, unleash the unstoppable force on what will turn out to be a very much not immovable object. He hooked an extra blaster to his hip, picked up the Mandalorian gun and spare bullets hidden away in the Captain’s Chair, ignored his friend’s half-laugh.

“Look out, Piett and Veers are back in action.”

He sensed it when they disappeared. An entire Executor class Star Destroyer emptied of all life in the time it took his heart to beat. Three hundred thousand souls, vanished without trace, even in the Force, even from Anakin himself, leaving him gasping. Distantly he heard the medics panic at his physical reactions to such a momentous psychological shock. He’d denied the offer of high grade ana- anaeust- knockout drugs in favour of sinking into the Force to swim through the hundreds of thousands of lives in his vicinity to better allow the Force to run its helping peace through his body.

He sat up. The doctors screeched in horror, bustling around him, attempting to push him to lie flat again.

He looked at his Sergeant.

He tried to say, contact the ship.

He tried to say, for the love of the Force get a contact established with the Lady.

He tried to say, they’re all missing and I’m afraid and hurting and we’re alone and I can’t go through this again, I can’t lose everyone and everything yet again, I can’t, we have to be wrong, call them and prove me wrong.

He said, “Someone has taken our crew and the Lady.”

The impact of such a statement hit him at the same instant as his Sergeant: horror, fear, petrifying terror, breathless anxiety. High in orbit hung the Lady, their home, their life, and somehow everyone aboard had vanished. Not died. Not left. Vanished.

“I don’t wish for panic, but I need this procedure to go as rapidly as possible. I can hurry the process with the Force I believe,” he told the chief medic, fixing his burning blue eyes on the man’s dark ones.

The medics conferred rapidly, finally concluding that it was Darth Heckin Vader on their table and that he was certainly able to make his own medical decisions, and that yes they could do it since his lungs were in place and the stitches needed only a layer of protection before they would have dipped him in bacta for a few hours and released him to Doctor Henley, but they were markedly not happy about it. Neither were any of his troops – but then, when were they ever happy on the rare occasions when their commanding officer lay injured.

The Lady felt so empty that he found himself shaking, grasping out for life-signs. Two, only two, but the two he found most relieving: Piett and Veers. Their General and Admiral were alive and moving and angry. Time blurred as he swirled through the currents of the Force, but that was okay. He trusted his troops with his life.

“Approaching the Lady, Sir,” announced the piloting Sergeant, “Hails unanswered.”

“I’ll try getting the doors opened for us.” Anakin sank back through the Force, seeking his men, allowing the messages of the Force to pass into his brain to unpack when he awoke. There – Firmus. Admiral, it’s Anakin.

Surprise, shock, relief tinged with worry. Sir. Everyone is gone.

I felt it. Have you uncovered anything?

Well, a little. Max and I will let you in and then we’ll catch you up. Are all your men alive?

Indeed.

“Preparing for landing,” warned the chief medic, surprising him out of the trance he’d entered, “Hold tight and remember to breathe, my Lord.”

He sighed, but obeyed the unsaid order to hold his oxygen mask on for the duration, knowing that disagreeing with medics got nothing but sedation in the long run. Truth be told, his new lungs ached like he’d been breathing in too-cold air, crackling and rustling against his ribcage. Still, as everyone in the shuttle very obviously thought, any temporary pain was better than the damnable black suit.

The 501st had happily burned as much of it as they’d been allowed to, making a ceremony of it, gifting him with a full set of beskar’gam, white like theirs and decorated in 501st blue and 212th gold, flecks of green and yellow and purple forming the Dai Bendu symbols of the Order and family and hope: a reminder of the Generals and Commanders and vod’e lost to Sideous’ machinations. Everyone had cried. Anakin made a mental note to collect it and wear it before they actually did anything potentially dangerous.

The ship settled gently in one of the smaller hangars, Piett and Veers rushing over from the control room before they’d done much more than get the ramp down so he could disembark.

“Every single person except us two and you who were on the planet has disappeared entirely, and it was in the space of half a second,” stated Piett abruptly. Anakin slowed, wondering at just how such a feat was accomplished.

Worryingly, the only beings he thought could handle that were Darths Plagueis and Sideous, which would be bad at best and catastrophic at worst. One of the medics – Blake, her name was, Kit Blake, or something similar – suggested they do their debrief in the medical bay then work through the ship to ensure nothing had happened since The Blip. Wise of her to suggest it, but Firmus and Sergeant Malloy merely looked to him expectantly. Malloy was one of only three clones left after The Blip – they were sticking with that, it seemed, and honestly, it was a sight better than some of his past mission incident names – and clearly had regained any belief in him he’d lost whilst he was dar-jetii, imkyan, under Sideous’ thumb. It still rankled that the chips were so hard to fully remove – but he understood. His own childhood slave chip remained in his thigh, disabled, yet present. They hadn’t been able to get it out.

“Lead on, Doctor,” encouraged Piett. She led them into a lower deck medbay – of course, he remembered, they were all connected by an internal commlink system separate to that of the wider network.

Peculiar, to be so deep in the Force on his home-vessel and not have the comforting throb of so many lives surrounding him, but the hunt for potential danger was made easier for it. Under an engine pipe, tools dropped after The Blip were carefully moved and the open seals closed. Kitchen ovens were turned off – any unnecessary luxury systems slowed or halted – he checked over the engine and hyperdrive and internal systems. The Force whirled angrily, hissing down his spine in outrage that such a deed had been done.

“Well,” he said when he opened his eyes to find almost half an hour passed, his remaining crew surrounded by datapads and flimsis. “Good news is that we’ll be fine. Bad news is that, in the words of an old friend, something is up.”

“In the Force?”

“Yep.”

“Kriff.”

“It’s been an hour, right?” Max nodded silently, eyes hard. “Well. They haven’t come back, but the Force is reacting most strangely. I think I can probably find more clues using it, but it’s undeniably angered over something – not infected by anger from people, but angry in itself. That worries me. The last time I felt this was when the Order went down, a massive upheaval in the balance of the Force at large.”

The three clones – Malloy, Snik, and Oik – flinched in unison at the reminder of the darkest event of their lives. Since he was open to the Force, he may as well stay that way, so he used the old frail bonds between them to send comfort and forgiveness. None of that mess had been their fault. The massacre, the whole Purge, was on Sideous, and himself (if he’d only been gentler, humbler, if he’d only listened and talked to his family) only.

Firmus dropped his head to the desk for a breath, pulling the air deep into himself just like in one of Anakin’s meditation sessions. In the years they’d served together the crew at large had picked a few things up, including basic shielding and meditation, and it hadn’t become unusual for Vader to lead breathing exercises in stressful situations. Now was certainly the time for it.

“And the Lady?”

What did he have to say? It was he who had brought her to life, he who had carried the Kyber crystals that gave her consciousness for months and years as close to his broken body as he could, he who had holed up in her heart, the plasma core, for the many months of her creation. Lady was his, his birthed from his pain and unspent love for lost children; she had spoken to him on their first mission, wound her resonance through his sense of self in a manner he’d so rarely felt from any Kyber crystal. The Admiral was her favourite of her crew, beloved, but even Firmus couldn’t comprehend the loss of a missing bond where one’s crystals should lie in the psyche.

“I see,” he said quietly, “poor Lady.”

Five years of war, an almighty rebellion against the Emperor, and another year of peace. For seven years he has lived aboard the Lady, honed his men and their behaviour to make them as close to the line of treason as he can get them without the Emperor catching on to his schemes; seven years of unity. And someone, or something, had taken that from him.

He took a deep breath, “I am really rather upset about this,” Anakin said quietly. “I suppose that we’d better make a plan of action then.”

“We certainly can’t handle the Lady alone,” murmured Max, his hand gentle on his friend’s back.

Look, listen, see, crooned the Force, lilting through his open shields. What, he asked, probed, sought; what is it you would have me see? Bright nebulae danced on the edges of his awareness, kaleidoscopic, with low flaring lights of other Force Sensitives like sparks from a fire - there. Anakin focussed in, transcending all mortal bounds in a single grasp over the length on the galaxy. Twin lights, like binary suns, woven into the tapestry of life that was the universe, their bright-white and burning-grey threads twining like vines. He reached out, brushing against their shields. One was all Light, gentle like gold sunshine – like the Fountains of the Temple. The other was far shadier, shrouded by a presence that felt distinctly Dark, like the deep blackness of space, or the emptiness of the Council Chamber in the years after the Purge. It perked up, Darkness oozing from it where Anakin’s own Grey tendrils just touched the miasma.

Hello again, Anakin Skywalker.

Shadows, Snips, visions of the future he tried to avoid but lived out anyway, a planet under his control, Obi-Wan, the Light and the Dark -

“Oh, kriff’s sake,” he swore, supplementing his annoyance with a string of muttered Dai Bendu.

His General gave him a quizzical look. He didn’t miss the hurried motions of Oik signing ‘Skywalker Bullshit’ to his brothers; it was rather nice to know that the Universe hadn’t changed all that much. Under his durasteel hands, the table felt of nothing at all, merely a pressure against the sensors in the synth-skin. Against his bared face the air whispered over his scars, a little tight with stress. Inside his chest, his new lungs expanded and shrunk, expanded and shrunk, a part of his body now; unified in the Force.

One with the Force –

Breathe in –

One with my body –

Breathe out –

One with all that I feel –

And there it went again, the brush of Dark and Light in dizzying strength; brushing against his presence with an almost teasing emotion, as if they called to him to follow, follow, follow, just as he had on the Mortis-planet so long ago. How long now, he wondered grimly, how long now since he Fell to the Son and the Daughter Fell with him. Spark flew down the tapestry of life, unsung songs half-humming to him, guiding him to see, witness, observe, tugging him like children tug by the hand to follow the path of bright specks of life.

“My Lord?”

Anakin Skywalker came back to his own body in a sharp snap of awareness like being awoken by the burst of a blaster. “There may be an explanation,” admitted the Grey Force User, “but you will absolutely not appreciate it.”

Ever the long-suffering leader, Firmus heaved a sigh. When did he ever like the explanations provided, when so often they could be summarised as more of that Force bullshit? “I suppose,” he mused, “I had better make everyone a cup of tea.”

The doctors made that little near-inaudible noise which meant the same as a sigh. Kix, he remembered, had been an expert in the universal subvocal language of medics.

“My Lord.”

“Firmus, I am begging you to call me Anakin,” his friend pleaded. The Admiral smirked, stepping closer to Anakin’s side so they could watch the stars slowly pass. The tall once-Jedi glanced down at him. “How went the astronavigation?”

He sighed, scrubbed at his face in a rare display of frustration. “A few of the junior medics are pretty good, and they’re obviously all very quick at the mathematics of it all, but honestly? It’s fiddly.” The headache that had been building since the debacle kicked off throbbed against his temples, tapping with sharp points behind his eyes. Firmus let out a low groan. “Honestly, sir, I’m frankly astounded that we pulled it off even once.”

Warmth filled his torso, radiating from the point of his shoulder as if Anakin laid a hand there and poured affection and strength through the Force. “I am not, my friend.”

Firmus smiled, encouraged. Such unshaken faith in their capabilities meant the crew felt the pressure to perform, above and beyond even the strictest of standards – because Lord Vader was no liar. If their Lord believed a thing could be done, harebrained scheme or not, it would be done. “Thank you. How feel the new lungs?”

Hearing his Lord – his commanding officer, his friend – take a loud, deep breath, then hold it, hold it in a way he couldn’t when wearing the suit, sent a fond smile crawling up his face more effectively than anything else had in days.

“They feel amazing.”

Good.

“The Force does not.”

Ah. Therein lay the rub, he thought wryly; nothing in life ever came free. Especially for them, it seemed, the Force extracted a toll that felt so close to being insurmountable. How had Anakin Skywalker done it? How had he forgiven the universe for all the pain it had put him through? Firmus was certain that he himself would never forgive himself for the horrors he’d had a thumb in – not that they could have averted anything. And they had taken action, had they not? Packed up and left, he and Max and the over 300,000 souls under their protection. “And what is it telling you, my Lord?”

“Our men were taken for a reason, but I can’t quite tell what exactly it was. There are two presences in the Force that I am not at all comfortable with. I have explained to you how the remnants of the Jedi went into hiding, even in the Force?”

He had. That had been the longest of nights.

“I sense two presences. They are young, still, and innocent,” Anakin whispered, the words offered to Firmus like secrets on the wings of the wind, like shards of kyber crystals. “Yet shrouding them are two ancient presences I have not felt since the midst of the Wars, Firmus. I had forgotten them.”

Lazily, the universe continued turning, as ignorant and uncaring of the passage of the Lady through its midst as it had ever been. “And they are leading you to this planet?”

Their young leader paused, considering. “No, not they specifically, but the Force is telling me that this little nowhere-planet is where we must go.”

Firmus snorted into the silence following the statement. “Hell of a way to get your attention, when they could have sent a memo and got pencilled into the calendar,” he teased, grinning at his Lord’s too-high wheeze of laughter; they would make it home, all of them. How could they not, with their Lord at the helm? They stood together for a while longer, trying to fill up the horrible disorientation of a silent Star Destroyer that should never run quiet. No aides scrambling with reports, nothing popping or buzzing or hissing concerningly as engineers yelled at each other in closed-off corridors about how yellow tape was not the universal fix-all solution. “My Lord.”

“Mm?”

He rolled his eyes. “Put your Sith-damn respirator back on.”

Thirty hours was the amount of time it took for Firmus to get twitchy at not having a bridge to command. The medics had cleared off down to the medbays to ensure nothing had been left out, or dangerous, or whatever. After an hour’s discussion the seventeen-strong remnant of the Lady Executor had decided to linger on the bridge, bringing in quilts and cushions to form sleeping-nests in the nooks formed by the various stations. Nobody wanted to be alone, not right now. He wouldn’t have let the last of his crew out of his sight anyway. Much to his own surprise, Firmus had managed to sleep.

“You look on edge.”

“Why thank you Max, I hadn’t noticed,” he sniped back to his friend. Their shoulders brushed – or rather, Firmus’ shoulder to Max’s bicep, affectionate warmth spreading between them. “It’s these blasted calculations. They’re easy enough to do using the base-7 but it’s the conversions that are time consuming. Anakin does it for fun, so now it’s his job. We can all do it, just slowly.”

Max hummed. “Not ideal when we may need to jump very rapidly, depending on what awaits us at our spooky coordinates.”

Oh, don’t get him started on that – diving headfirst into mayhem was for people with more energy and fewer people reliant on his good judgement. “Indeed.” After all, there was only so much even Lord Vader himself could do in this situation, even without the pain caused by badly treated burns and the torturous suit. What were those things called that allowed the use of the Force? Midichlorians. Apparently, his sense of the Force was stronger than ever, his midichlorians multiplying healthily. “We shall hope that such measures are not necessary,” he said firmly, his mind wandering gradually.

“Firmus.”

“Yes?”

Max brushed his shoulder gently. “Go get some sleep, my friend,” he urged, and laughed when Firmus slumped in his Captain’s Chair, laughed even harder when he had to wriggle around to unfasten his blaster-holsters with a disgruntled grumble at the inconvenience. “We will still be here when you awaken.”

Surely the Force wouldn’t steal any more from them. “I’ll hold you to that, Max,” he threatened, and set himself to sleep with the ease of a well-trained soldier.

Anakin sat in his meditation chamber, his saber’s crystals held over his head as the saber components drifted lazily in orbit around his body. The Force sang, but those elusive trails of Dark eddied like smoke around the presence of a small child. Alderaan, he noticed, and then suspiciously as he narrowed his focus, the Alderaani palace. A child of a palace servant, perhaps? Or, he mused darkly, the little daughter of the Queen Organa. Adopted, if he recalled correctly, right at the end of the war. Right when his own daughter should have been born. How bitterly unfair, for them to be given what he had awaited so eagerly.

_Hello again, little brother,_ greeted the Darkness, _have you come for your daughter?_

He flinched, saber parts clattering to the floor, recoiling from the implications of such a comment. _I have no child. The child died with my wife._ The wound left by the losses had never healed over, remained burning, oozing, festering inside him.

The Darkness grinned lazily, all sharp fangs and decaying wings. _Is that so? Look closer, little brother, look closer,_ it taunted him, cackling in the back of his mind. She was well-shielded, that little child, hidden under a rippling wall of water and ice; it reminded him of Ahsoka, a little, in the construction of it.

_Look, look!_

Ahsoka, he thought warily; he almost retreated, unwilling (unworthy) to be in her presence after all he’d done, if indeed it was she who’d built this little girl’s shielding bases. His little sister who had been killed on Mortis by the very creature ensnaring him now. _I will not._

_Do not run in fear_ , scoffed the Dark entity, _that is the path of cowards. But then,_ he drawled, talons curling in the back of Anakin’s mind, _you always were, weren’t you? Afraid, and angry because of it, and you ran into my grasp of your own volition like the coward you are._

_I did not_ , he protested hotly, but the creature merely laughed and drew away from the white heart of the little Alderaani child with a final taunt.

_Prove it._

_I do not want to._

The creature of darkness conveyed the impression of a shrug, twining back around the child with what Anakin would almost call affection, if reaching fingers and the possessive coil of power could be affection. _Suit yourself, little brother. Your mind will change soon enough._

Anakin startled out of his meditation to find his crystals clenched far too tight in his left hand, his lungs aching from stress. He guided the oxygen mask over his head with the Force, glaring at the opposite wall. How dare the Son taunt him so – how very dare he, he snarled, and hurled his crystals away from him. They trilled, demanding he catch them before impacting the deck; they crooned as he brought them back to his body, sliding the saber together with the ease of long practice. He sensed them reaching out, realigning themselves with his own vast Force presence, and he felt too when they chimed sorrowfully when they couldn’t feel the presence of the Lady reach to them. What was he to do with the Alderaani child? The Dark was fuelled by passion, desire; by his desire for his family’s survival. If the Dark was preying on his repressed yearning for a family, would it have invented a child to fix his attention on? It would be far more practical to use the daughter of his own blood.

A Skywalker child, born of the Force.

He shifted uncomfortably, wary of the impossible direction his thoughts were taking him. No good would come from dwelling on the words of the Son. He stood. The bridge would be a better place to be alone than his meditation chamber now sullied by the Dark.

“There,” pointed Oik, his eyes as sharp as ever they were on the battlefield. “That one, I think.” His hunch proved correct; a tiny unnamed planetoid coated in greenery grew into view, mist swirling over it in murky tendrils, ashen-grey and armour-white by turn. Firmus leant forwards, entranced by the spectre of this final destination, the accumulation of the last few days of stress and mysticism.

He shot a sharp glance to Veers. “This is the place?”

Their commander nodded, silent, his breath a soft low rasp. At the nudge of his medic he raised the oxygen mask back to his lips silently. He inhaled, bracing himself from Firmus back into the Admiral, the chosen Admiral of Lord Vader himself, the man with a spine built of the very durasteel as the ribs of his almighty starship. “Then we descend.”

His commanding officer flinched, raising his hand to his brow in a rare admission of pain that had his attending medic hovering anxiously. Veers had long perfected the art of concentrating without watching, a skill he was employing carefully now in this moment where their only Force User seemed almost buckled by some psychic attack. How very telling, he mused, that we know the signs of psychic interference.

“This is the place,” said the once-Sith quietly. “We need to be there.”

“Stay close,” Oik warned the landing party with a growl as the ramp opened, swampy mist rising up through the opening. Himself, Veers, Piett; Oik and two battle-worn medics. Not, he would admit, his worst ever team, but perhaps he should have come alone. At least Snik and Malloy were still aboard the Lady, safe and secure, if struck. They would be fine, he was sure. The Force would provide.

Dark and Light danced along his senses in kaleidoscopic glee at his arrival, their victory. Perhaps, he admitted behind his desert-storm layers of shields (are you proud, Master? Look at what you have taught me, how to hide so well I am invisible), the Force had different plans for his future than he did, but what else was new? Anakin Skywalker was done living his life to the tunes of others, danced like a marionette on silken threads by smooth words and heavy threats. What could the Dark do now? It had already stolen his crew. “Stay together,” he ordered, once more a General and leader, “I don’t know just what we’re about to face.”

In typically orderly fashion, the small landing party proceeded over ground he was surprised – suspicious – to note was hard underfoot, the mist unnaturally dry. Magicks, perhaps, but more likely a result of the proximity of the two children of the very Force itself whose Signatures fuelled his own, a feedback loop of strength and pure existence. Life made into a body, constrained and restricted. There were always oddities, where the Living and Cosmic Forces intertwined.

The Daughter appeared in front of them with a low flash of greened light, ignoring the alarmed cried of his companions and his own vicious curses towards her. Anakin found himself unable to attend to them, his entire being pulled towards her serenity like a comet to a planet.

_Look_ , bade the Daughter with a wave of her delicate hand and a tranquil smile _, a gift_.

_A reward_ , corrected the Son, not even gracing him with a sneer on the half-corporeal face, his whole attention on the sleeping form of the girl pulled by the Force to this planet. The Alderaani girl, the one with the rippled shields, lay in a cocoon of Force-tendrils both Dark and Light, cradled by it like a newborn babe. The one the Dark had claimed to be his daughter. Darkness prodded down at her, intense curiosity radiating in waves from the entity of the Son. _This one will be mine. You can have the boy._

The Daughter laughed at his dismissive tone, high and musical. _How very magnanimous of you, twin._

_Anything for our little brother._

Anakin decided he didn’t enjoy being the brunt of this cruel joke of the Universe, dangling his dream in front of him and his remaining crew like this. Had the Force stolen his men for this cruel taunt?

The Daughter tilted her pretty face. _Look! I got the son. How droll._

A boy, the age of the girl, their Signatures perfectly complementary in a manner that meant they must be twins. He looked – he looked like Anakin. He looked like Mother.

He looked like a Skywalker. A son, just as Padme had insisted; therefore also a daughter, as he had known. Luke and Leia, he knew in a burst of Understanding, knew to his very soul, his very heart; his own children. Fury rose up, from his stomach to his throat, vitriol ready to burst from his tongue directed he-knew-not-where.

The Son laughed, suddenly, entertained by his sudden grieving rage, as though tickled by some joke or whimsy. _How about some action_ , he snarled; with a sharp gesture Veers’ blaster exploded into viciously sharp shards, erupting in a long arc towards a Twi’lek in grimy grey. The Twi raised his own blaster, tugged out of the path of the shards by a flexible human in a tattered vaguely piratical outfit. From there he lost track of the fight, his saber vibrant as his crystals sang with the thrill of a challenge and the dizzying power of the Twins.

There came a time in every arc of his life-path, he knew, when the Force stopped spiralling, screaming and yelling at him to listen to it. Those moments were utterly silent. If he had to describe it, he would say it was rather like one of the renowned Masters had turned around to face you, and raised their eyebrows with a challenging query in the Force: the world simply halted around you. But it was even more than that. It was the dread silence of the end of one’s tether; the warning quiet of an oncoming storm; the final raised eyebrow of the penultimate step into a mistake.

The Force was still, as if it stared him right in the eyes.

_You are the Chosen One. You are the Balance. You are the Force. Use it._

Anakin closed his eyes as he flinched from the memories, reaching out. His men, too few. The rebels, desperate. The locals trying to kill them all. His children oh-so-young-and-bright, his Admiral, his General, the clone troopers on the field who had known him so long they could predict the plan. Distantly, bright in alarm yet half-dulled in reflexive fear of the monsters walking the threads of life, he felt Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan, and more-and-more-and-more tiny sparks of Force Sensitive children who had stepped out, finally, of the darkness and revealed themselves. He pushed his emotions aside; he would have time to unpack all of that later, or maybe never. Mortis, he remembered. Kneel. Wrapping his sense of self around the deities of the Force and imposing his will on them, because they had his family in their claws. It had been a test. Was this also?

“Stop,” he ordered, and the world halted. Bright blaster-bolts hung in the air, glinting off his men’s armour, red and blue and green. His own armour, the valuable beskar painted white with symbols in as many colours as they could find, shone under the neon glow; he was a living, walking memorial to all that had been lost to the Dark.

_What do you wish for? Destruction of the dangerous?_

_That is not what I want._

_You do not know what you want! Reach out, take what is owed to you. Kill those who threaten what is yours._

_No._

_No? Well,_ whispered the Dark to him, oil slicking down his back, talons or blades curling against the scars on his face, _perhaps you can be convinced._

Leia was lifted by the Dark, cradled like a newborn in the tendrils of Force. She wouldn’t fall, oh no, not the child of the Chosen One, yet the terror for her clenched his new lungs; he felt the swoop into the Dark that happened to his soul. _What do you want from us?_

The Force swirled, greenish Light blooming, unfurling, winding into the Dark and oh, oh that is how it should feel to be submerged in the Force in the beautiful whirl of balance. Vines grew from the bare dirt under their feet before crumbling back down into black dirt, the constant cycle of birth and decay, vines and trees and towering stalks.

_To exist, as we did on Mortis_ , said the Daughter as she wrapped herself around Luke. _To bring the Light once more, to return balance through your children. The Father, the Son, and the Daughter._

“Oh, absolutely not,” he stated aloud, backing away very rapidly from the implications of her claim. The Dark – the Son – snarled, attacked his shields, but he was a sandstorm, he was the desert, the sky and the sand, and it could not get through. Not anymore. “Not again. I’m not an idiot.”

Anakin would swear the twin embodiments of the Force paused in their assault long enough to give him a dry look.

“You will not possess my children.”

The Son purred down his ear, coiling dark and silky around Leia. _It is too late for that, little brother._

“No!”

Leia fixed her eyes on his, vibrant gold burning around her pupils. She burned, fumed, smoked, became as mist in the night to his senses as the Son melted into her, overtaking her Force Signature with Darkness.

_I will not harm her, little brother, or should I now call you Father?_

“Let her go,” he ordered, the Force humming through his fingertips, dancing down his very bones, laughing and teasing and infuriated and oh, oh so very alive.

_Ah, little brother, I cannot, do you not understand? She is to be my chains, just as your son is to be the chains of our Sister._

Helplessly confused, Anakin stared at the gargoyle wrapping his wings around his daughter. Despite his own terror, his little daughter displayed nothing except his own fierceness, stubborn and unmoved in the Force. Was he to find her, only for her to be lost to him once more? Surely, he spat bitterly at the Force, this is not your attempt at a punishment for me?

_Have I not suffered enough?_

The Son snarled, the noise pulsed through his whole body; his men flinched backwards, Firmus remaining as close as he could bear to. Brave, so brave.

_Is this about you, little brother?_

One with the Force –

Breathe in –

One with my body –

“This is not about me,” the son of the Force realised, a whole new burst of suspicion birthing in his mind, “but then, it isn’t about you two, either, is it?”

The Daughter’s green-white wings draped off his son’s shoulders, like the train of one of his mother’s many dresses (oh, Padmé), glowing with the light of growing living things. Luke turned to face him, reaching out for his sister, or maybe the Daughter reached for her brother. “No,” Luke said, and he shivered, because the Daughter’s voice hummed underneath the childish pitch, and echoes of the Jedi – of the Jedi he’d killed – vibrated below that. “Look, Father.”

Anakin looked.

It had been many long years since he’d dared to sink into the Force with his whole being, probably even before the Clone Wars. The sting of missing his master-brother-father-anchor struck harder than ever before.

What could he see?

“You needed me to come of my own will,” he realised. Like the ecstasy of a melody the Force filled his blood. “I had to choose to come here, or the ritual wouldn’t work.”

The Daughter inclined her head, regal and beautiful and dangerous, his son nestled within the glow of her power, a beacon in the Force. “And what else, little brother?”

The tapestry of life coiled and scrunched and stretched under his searching. What was he looking for? What was it that he was required to see? His crew was stolen from his as bait, to make him want to come to this tiny planet nobody cared about; but his crew were just casualties, innocents plucked out of place by the machinations of these two living entities. Another thread of life sang under his touch. _There, there, here_ , sang the Force, guiding him down the weave of life, _see now, see here._

“To return the balance,” he whispered. Anakin closed his eyes, overcome. Was it not enough to be a child surrounded in prophecy? No, he thought bitterly, stabbing a sharp spike of his irritation at the two entities of the Force which made them recoil, no, the Force wanted his children too. Coils of the elusive metallic tint of the Cosmic Force wound through his senses, sharp and bitter like the over-hot metal of a hyperdrive. Around Leia’s small body formed and cracked and splintered dark echoes of futures-coming and past-recurring, unfurling like ragged wings behind her, her presence shrouded yet not consumed by the blackness of the Son. There was, he remembered, rather a difference between Dark and Sith. “So, what? You want me to bind you to my children?”

The Daughter – or maybe Luke – smiled at him. Anakin sucked in a breath. Well, he thought, never let it be said he led a boring life.


End file.
